When you make your first visit, make sure you take enough time to stroll around and admire the Karolinska Institutet and Hospital’s infrastructures, either in Solna and Huddinge:  they are quite different and have its proper charm and atmosphere, so take your time and discover the amazing places around it =)

If you have your papers in order and your stay, internships and supervisors planned/scheduled, everybody will be expecting you on the right time because Karolinska Institutet has one of the highest organization levels I’ve seen: this meaning the right information will be available to the right person on the right time, so you can rest assured that little subjects will be left to the unknown or improvisation.

If you come to Sweden to stay at your room, you better find a big one, that being Pax. If you are a social person who likes to live and only want’s a room to live, make to Jägargatan 20 student accommodation: you will have an 8 x 2m coffin to live in, but besides being the cheapest and most better located in Stocks (believe me), the social life will make the rest. This meaning that it is a small accommodation, 100 people tops, so about 50 of them are socially and you will have the chance to socially engage with them, so a more familiar atmosphere is found here, rather than the more impersonal I’ve witnessed in the remaining accommodations.

 If you are coming to Stockholm through the winter, you already know it is going to be freaking cold: be prepared to cope with -20ºC or to live around -10ºC in a warm winter version =) The trick to live with it is to use layers of clothes, two on the bottom and three on the top I recommend, because all the interiors are severely heated: this means if you have jackets difficult to take off, you will be very hot when you are inside any building. Besides this, be prepared for no sun, for months. And that means be disciplinated in your sleeping hours or your biologic clock will be messing with you as it did to my mediterranean one. If you are not skin-self-loving-enough or getting desesperate over the situation, Karolinska in Solna has a free solarium where you can visit to replace some melatonin ;) Best advise is never to stay at home, because that really depresses ;)

A great help to you, before, during and after Stockholm and Karolinska, shall be Google Chrome: install it and set the settings as automatic page translation from swedish to your language. This will allow you travelling through the diferente dot.se pages like a true Swedish, really handy tip.

The country, the city and KI needs your energy, your spirit and your contribution to improve an already cuttingedge international healthcare system, so come prepared to work, share your experience and knowledge, and in return KI and the Swedes will teach important things and show you many interesting technologies, so come prepared for a (enriching) lifetime experience!

The key to conquer any nation’s people is the language, so make an effort to learn Swedish. Specially if you are a native English speaker. If Karolinska has the kindness to offer you a Swedish course (basic Swedish), take it and attend to it twice a week: in the first 5 weeks it will be a bit of overload, but will keep you busy on the dark night and you will learn some useful sentences and also about the culture (hopefully), while on 1x week you will learn to sparsely and on the third month you will still be on it. Don’t be worried, it is not difficult, and there are demanding words that you should learn, like “Ursäkta”/excuse me, “Förlåt”/sorry, “Förlåt, jag pratar lite svenska/jag pratar inte svenska, kan du pratar engelska?”/sorry, I speak little Swedish, can you speak English?

And, if you by any chance think your future can pass by Sweden,don’t think it is going to be easy if you speak only English. Swedes have a great level of English, but that does not means you don’t make your share of effort.

If you think you come to have fun with little work, that’s an illusion: Swedes are not known as a little working people, so re-organize your priorities and think about having fun after. This of course if you are working in the clinic. Then I congratulate you because you came to the country to watch the healthcare system working on field.  

If you going to attend to classes, learning theoric things you could’ve learned back at your home institution, I always saw those students have much more free time for social activities and having fun, so consider yourself lucky and make sure you enjoy that time!